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Food Miles and Buying Local and Seasonal

December 16, 2021   ·   0 Comments

By Martina Rowley

In the runup to Christmas and other religious festivities in December – and really, any annual holidays that revolve around certain special foods – have the heads of households actively shopping and preparing for one of the big culinary feasts. Whether your menu includes a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, brisket and latkes or any other mouthwatering and delicious range of foods, do you ever wonder how far away your food was grown, packaged and shipped to your local stores?

The term for that journey is “food miles”, meaning the distance a food item has travelled from its source (a farm, field, forest, body of water or greenhouse) to the point of sale. Food miles matter because according to estimates, the average North American meal travels between 2,400 to 4,000 kilometres (1,500 to 2,500 miles) from farm to table. That is the equivalent distance from Toronto to Calgary (2,700 km) or as far as Trinidad and Tobago (4,040 km). And if you are buying foods that are grown and sold much closer to home, it becomes ridiculous and incredibly wasteful to, for example, buy apples and garlic from China (10,000 km)!

Regardless of how ‘cheap’ oil may be, the cheapest transportation method for such distances is by ship, which contributes significantly to global pollution of air and sea, and does little to nothing to support local resources, jobs and farmers in our own country, province and local region. While you may save a little at the grocery store checkout, the intangible cost in these other areas – environmental and economic – is enormous. While one could argue that it supports the economy in China or wherever else our far-flung groceries may be coming from, we have plenty of farms and farmers and associated jobs on our own doorstep that need our Dollars.

But I digress. Quite some years ago, in early 2000 to be precise, a new awareness around the distance that much of our food travels kicked off initiatives, talks, blogs and books around the 1000 or even 100-mile diet. In 2005, Canadians Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon set themselves the challenge of eating only foods that were produced within a 100-mile radius of their home in the Vancouver area.  They were mindful of every single food product; not just fruit and vegetables but any type of farm produce and including the animals being fed locally sourced food as well. Their goal was to do this for a one-year trial and write about it. Both ended up losing a fair amount of weight and spending a huge amount of time preserving, canning and planting and then freezing foods during the growing season to ensure ample supplies in the winter. The reality is that such a strict adherence to a 100-mile diet becomes a full-time job and one that very few of us would be able to or want to take on.

Smith and MacKinnon did also find out how much we can reduce our food miles by simply buying only produce that is in season locally. That means no strawberries or other soft berries from California greenhouses because it’s the middle of winter and we can’t buy them locally. Produce like bananas, pineapples and other exotic fruits or vegetables are, of course, something we can never get from Canada and should be treated as a luxury food item, though I see no true need or personal desire to buy strawberries from far-flung greenhouses in the winter months, which I find have very little flavour anyway.

I am aware of some of the challenges of the cost of food production and how complex some of it is. For example, I was curious why so much lamb’s meat comes from New Zealand and why even the UK, which I always saw as prime sheep country, imports lamb’s meat from New Zealand. These complexities around the right quality farmland and pasture, and the lower cost of raising many flocks of sheep are something I had better not get into here!

What each of us can do though in terms of reducing our food miles, and which seems reasonable, is to spend a little extra time when we are shopping, checking food labels on the shelves or packages to stick with locally available, i.e. Ontario or Canada produce, such as potatoes, apples, peaches, cereals and flower, dairy products and meats, and mostly avoiding extravagances like insisting on buying fresh blueberries or raspberries in January. The emphasis is on fresh, since frozen berries are a very good alternative as they maintain most or all the nutrients when they are flash frozen during their peak growing season, with canned and preserved fruits like peaches and pears being a good second option. For heaven’s

When we may want to make some allowances for a bit of extravagance and luxury is, of course, around special family festivities like Christmas or Thanksgiving. And whether that means an imported, traditional British Christmas pudding or other indulgences that bust even a 1000-mile diet, I can live with that a couple of times a year. Merry Christmas!

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